President Donald Trump’s sudden announcement that the United States would scale back large-scale military exercises with South Korea risks reigniting concerns that the U.S. military is too limited to support key Western allies or maintain deterrence against authoritarian states that threaten the West.
It’s also a gift to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who is increasing his country’s threat to global stability and offering no concessions in return.
As the 10-day Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise involving tens of thousands of troops was scheduled to begin, President Trump said he had ordered the war games to be scaled back because North Korea “posed no threat and was respectful” to the Trump administration.
“Not only are these exercises expensive, with much of the cost being borne by the United States (as always!), but they also send completely inappropriate and hostile signals,” President Trump posted on Truth Social over the weekend.
It is difficult to reconcile President Trump’s statements with Chairman Kim’s actions.
North Korea’s leader has significantly expanded his military and illegal nuclear weapons program over the past few years, sending soldiers to gain real combat experience on Ukrainian battlefields and even providing Moscow with missiles that have killed Ukrainian civilians.
The aid to Russia comes with a mutual defense treaty signed with President Vladimir Putin two years ago. Mr. Kim also cemented trilateral cooperation with Russia and China nearly a year ago, when the three dictators held a grand public show in Beijing to watch some of China’s most modern military equipment pass through Beijing to commemorate the 80th anniversary of victory in World War II.
All the while, North Korea has been building up its arsenal, and Mr. Kim is frequently pictured in state media overseeing military milestones, including the activation of a new guided-missile destroyer earlier this year, with his teenage daughter and likely successor at his side.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has frequently complained that allies, particularly European nations, are not sharing its defense costs, and as recently as late May, it touted South Korea as an ideal ally.
“If you want to know what burden sharing looks like, think about South Korea. South Korea has consistently invested in its defense…because they can’t afford to treat war like an academic exercise. They live on the front lines, so they’re building a real fighting force,” Secretary of Defense Pete Heges said in a speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue Defense Conference in Singapore.
Hegseth is right. South Korea is acting out of necessity, and the Iran war serves as a reminder that the United States will always move its assets to where they are needed most. During the conflict, which has been simmering for nearly six months, the Pentagon has had to call in troops and military power from across Asia as it builds up forces in the Persian Gulf.
Early in the war, Washington moved missile interceptors from the Korean Peninsula to the Middle East. And just last week, the only aircraft carrier based in the Western Pacific, the USS George Washington, announced it was headed to waters near Iran to rescue its sister ship, the USS Abraham Lincoln, which has not been in port for more than 200 days and is plagued by reports of low morale.
“Bilateral exercises with South Korea would unnecessarily drain U.S. resources and readiness at a time when U.S. resources and readiness are lacking,” said Jennifer Kavanaugh, director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that advocates for restraint on diplomatic spending.
But others dispute her premise that the exercises are unnecessary, arguing that scaling back them would put the roughly 30,000 U.S. troops in South Korea and another 50,000 or more in neighboring Japan in even more danger.
President Trump’s actions “decreased coalition readiness, endangered the U.S. military, and have no tangible benefits for the United States,” said retired U.S. Navy Adm. Mark Montgomery, now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a national security think tank based in Washington, D.C.
In fact, most of the cost of the Ulchi Freedom Shield has already been paid for, and any cuts to training will have to be made up somewhere or U.S. readiness will suffer, said Karl Schuster, former director of the U.S. Pacific Command Joint Information Center.
Criticizing South Korea for cutting back on exercises and not paying more costs continues Trump’s pattern of criticizing longtime allies that received American support during the Cold War and in places like Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, and even threatening to seize their own territory, such as Greenland, which is part of NATO ally Denmark.
Meanwhile, the U.S. president has rejected criticism of Kim Jong Un, who is complicit in prolonging Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, while using it to build up North Korea’s weapons and endangering nearby U.S. forces.
“What you’re seeing is an advantage for North Korea. It’s actually an unforced error on our part,” said Cedric Layton, a former U.S. Air Force colonel and military analyst for CNN.
It remains to be seen how far Kim will be able to exploit that advantage.
President Trump frequently changes policy, and all the elements of the Ulchi Freedom Exercise are in place, so reducing the scale of the exercise may not have much of an impact on the ground.
But North Korea has also long sought to have the United States cancel its military exercises with South Korea. On Monday, I woke up to the news that the commander in chief of the U.S. military was ordering a disadvantage.
Trump is believed to have long wanted to meet Kim again and may see this gesture as paving the way for that to happen. However, his sudden attitude has implications for the United States and its allies.
Few would argue that the U.S. military could do to North Korea in 2026 what it was able to do during President Trump’s first term. When Kim conducted a ballistic missile test in 2017, Trump dispatched three U.S. aircraft carriers to patrol the waters around the Korean peninsula, threatening North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
These threats ultimately led to Kim having three face-to-face meetings with Trump. But these talks ultimately failed to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, which Kim had only expanded. He is currently estimated to have dozens of nuclear warheads and has vowed to build many more.
In the US government’s air campaign against Iran, the Iranian government has not yet backed down. And with major weapons stockpiles rapidly depleting, the only thing that appears to be really decreasing is U.S. military readiness.
Analysts warn that scaling back the current training could cause long-term damage.
Praise one month, buffeted by criticism the next, allies may decide to remove Washington from long-term military planning. There have already been moves in South Korea for Seoul to have its own nuclear weapons and not rely on U.S. deterrence.
Meanwhile, Japan is growing and modernizing its military at a pace not seen in the modern era, when post-Cold War stability was ensured by conflicts between US forces.
And several European countries that have stood side by side with the United States since World War II now have real questions about whether the NATO alliance will ultimately survive President Trump’s “America First” approach to global security.
The world is therefore a more dangerous place, a US military weakened by Iran cannot ensure America’s security, and a single actor’s mistake can spark a regional firestorm.
“What we do in these exercises is extremely important not only for the joint defense of South Korea and Japan, but also for the defense of the United States,” Leighton said.
